Friday, January 19, 2018

Russian Reformers Failed to Take into Consideration Russian Nationalism and Orthodoxy, Chubais Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, January 19 – Anatoly Chubais,
one of the main architects of Russia’s radical economic reforms in the 1990s,
says that he now considers that one of the main errors he and his like-minded
reformers may was “to a significant degree” their failure to take into
consideration “the special features of Russian culture.”

He and they, Chubais tells the RBC
news agency, particularly failed to consider that “Orthodoxy is a serious and
fundamental institution which one must understand rather than ignore.” Another
failure was their failure to understand that “the Russian people is not the same
as the Ukrainian people” (rbc.ru/society/17/01/2018/5a5f849e9a794744b994f95c?from=newsfeed).

There
are features in Russian culture which have held the country back, he continues,
but there are other parts of this cultural tradition which could and have made
a more positive contribution. Failure to consider that was a mistake, and had he
and the reformers not made it, they would have developed a different and more
successful strategy.

Over
the last 20 years, he says, Russian nationalism ahs evolved significantly. “Only
someone incapable of seeing his own nose would fail to see that.”Chubais adds that “nationalists now are in
the governments of no fewer than 15 European countries,” a trend that is very suggestive.

Chubais
stresses in conclusion that “when liberals try to propose some recipes, then
they ought to remember that they live in Russia and that their children live there
too.”

The
Russian reformer does not say but he very well could have that one of the
reasons Russian reformers approached things as they did is that they were encouraged
by their Western advisors who also downplayed the important of cultural
differences and argued, from their triumphalist positions, that on key issues,
one size fits all.

Until recently, Eidman says, “Chubais was
certainly the politician in Russia most distant from Orthodoxy and Russian
nationalism.” And the simplest explanation for his new political line is that
is that the reformer “simply wants to become part of the Putin ideological
mainstream” rather that remaining an outlier. He needs state support for
ROSNANO.

That is likely the best explanation of his
transformation, the commentator continues, but “in his own way, Chubais is
sincere.” He clearly believes that the reformers of the 1990s miscalculated
when they did not decide to use “Orthodoxy and nationalism as an effective ‘political
whip.’”

And “apparently, he sincerely envies Putin
who has been able to strengthen and cement in this way the power of the new ‘elite’
over the new ‘plebeians.’”Chubais and
his colleagues of two decades ago obviously “missed this chance.”